I was dangerously close to demonstrating it. “The idea does. But hold it.” An idea was crystallizing. “You wouldn’t do that. You’d hide it in a muscle mass.”
“How could they do that without your knowledge?”
“In the hospital. Not here, but in fucking Germany!” She shook her head slightly, not following me. “When I was in the army—when I was wounded!”
“But that was years ago.”
“See, that’s the mistake I’ve been making. This shit didn’t start a couple of weeks ago—it was set up while I was still in the army. They just didn’t activate it until they needed me.”
“‘They’? You think the army’s behind all this?”
I actually went cold in all the rippling heat. Some ductless gland that had evolved in order to deal with agencies that had three initials. “No. Huh-uh.” I pointed toward the car.
While we walked I asked about her aunt, who was dying of cancer. She made up a sob story that would melt the ice-cold heart of whoever was listening to parking-lot conversations.
As we approached the car I asked her to pop the trunk. “I want to take a look at the rifle,” I whispered.
“They’ll be watching.”
“Probably.” The trunk sprang open and I reached past the rifle box to a tackle box that I knew was full of tools. I selected a pair of pliers and slipped them into my front pocket while I was lifting the clumsy rifle box and struggling to open it.
I set the rifle on top of the box, still hidden to outside eyes. While running my left hand over the stock, I used my right to gently press the magazine release button. I slipped the top round off and then slid the magazine partway back, and returned the rifle to the box. But one round was in my shirt pocket now, and the magazine was loose, not pushed in. Kit looked mystified; she knew I had done something fishy but hadn’t followed it.
I scribbled a note, GUN WON’T WORK, though I was still a step away from that.
When we were up to speed on the highway I took out the cartridge and used the pliers to wiggle the bullet and separate it from the brass casing. While Kit chattered about music I emptied the powder out of the cartridge and rolled the window down and let the breeze blow the grey powder away. Then I reassembled the bullet, tapping it home firmly with the pliers, and put it back in my pocket.
It was an old saboteur’s trick. With the cartridge back in place, the emptied top round in the magazine, the rifle was a passive booby trap. If someone pulled the trigger, the hammer would fall on the empty cartridge’s primer, which would make a small explosion—just enough force to drive the bullet partway up the barrel and be stuck. When the next bullet was fired, full power, it would strike the first one, and the gun would blow up in the shooter’s face.
I could fire the weapon safely, because I knew to eject the first round before pulling the trigger. For anyone else it would be a nasty and perhaps fatal surprise.
I scrolled the map down and left and enlarged it. She looked over and held her finger over a small town, Carlinville, not tapping it. I nodded and we studied it for a second, and then turned off the map, and resumed talking about Steven Spielberg.
Interstate 55 had the cruise lane, so we took less than half an hour to get down to the Carlinville exit. Meanwhile I fiddled with her iPak and found out that Carlinville once had more houses ordered from the Sears catalog than anyplace else in the country, and was once the home of the woman H. G. Wells called “the most intelligent woman in America.” I passed that morsel on to Kit, and she said, “We just have to stop there and pay our respects.”
We passed by a small park in the middle of town; she looked at me and I nodded. Parked a block away and walked back, picking up a couple of ice cream cones on the way. We could watch the car from the park, in case somebody tried to put a dead body or an H-bomb in the trunk.
There was a bench in the shade of a tree next to a playground area. The kids were raising all kinds of hell. I spoke quietly.
“None of this makes any difference if they have a microphone up my ass.”
“I would have felt it.” She smiled. “Here’s my logic: I think they do have a device in or on your body, which they can track for location. But not listening.”
“Which ‘they’ are we talking about?”
“Does it make any difference now? Them versus us. But I don’t think it’s a listening device or a video bug, if we’re talking about Agent Blackstone and his gang. If they’d been listening to us, they’d know you’re innocent.”
I nodded. “Unless they think we think we’re being listened to all the time. Saying things to avert suspicion.”
“Yeah, but how far down that rabbit hole do you want to go? Blackstone being manipulated to feed us lines?”
I took his card out of my shirt pocket. Nothing fancy: plain picture, not a holo; James “Pepper” Blackstone, Analyst, Domestic Terrorism, Department of Homeland Security.
I held it up to my mouth. “Hello? Jimmy boy?”
“He probably likes to be called ‘Pepper.’”
I studied the card. “You know, you’re right. This has to stop somewhere. Blackstone didn’t know where the gun had come from. They didn’t have time to set up some damned phony scene in a gun shop in Des Moines.”
“Okay.”
“So that means someone who wasn’t working for them set me up. Nobody who buys a weapon in a gun shop doesn’t know he’s on Candid Camera. They got somebody who looks kind of like me.”
“What about the driver’s license?”
“That is a problem. The feds can’t get past that because they lack one crucial piece of evidence that I have: I do know I wasn’t there. Nobody did some voodoo crap and made me drive to Des Moines and buy a fucking gun!
“It’s simple. Someone hacked the god-damned system. If someone can program it, someone else can program around it. The ID dot on your license really boils down to a string of ones and zeros. Somebody got ahold of my string and put it in the system.”
“How?”
I had to laugh. “I don’t know! I’m not a fucking criminal!”
She put a finger on my arm. A woman on the other side of the play area was staring at me with a cross expression. No doubt a prissy G-man in drag.
I lowered my voice again. “Let’s just assume as a starting point that Blackstone is what he says he is. Tonight when we stop, we’ll write him a long e-mail with chapter and verse, everything that’s happened. ‘Here it is, take it or leave it.’ Even if they think I’m lying, at least it’ll go into my dossier. In case.”
“In case you die, you mean.”
“Well, yeah.” I started to frame something sarcastic to say but it evaporated on my lips. In that dappled noisy playground she was trembling, and looked like she was about to burst into tears.
“Sometimes I forget,” she said. “People trying to kill you is not a new thing.”
“Yeah. Me, too. I forget.”
But not really. Not ever.
2.
James “Pepper” Blackstone, M.S.
Analyst
Domestic Terrorism Working Group
Department of Homeland Security
800 East Monroe Street
Springfield, IL 62701-1099
Dear Agent Blackstone:
This is just to put down on paper some of the things we said, and perhaps forgot to say, when we spoke with you at your office May 18th, this afternoon.
For the record, I, Christian “Jack” Daley, have no active connection with the U.S. (or any other) government, except for monthly disability checks from the Veterans Administration, and occasional medical examinations there. I have never been employed by the government in any way other than the straightforward, if unwilling, relationship I had with the Selective Service Commission and the U.S. Army: I was drafted and then chose to “volunteer for the draft,” as the official language has it: I was told that I could get a better assignment that way, and still serve only two years, after training.