Hot Wire (20 page)

"Pain in the ass," he whispered.

The car turned at the corner and No-Neck pulled out a few minutes later, heading back to University and following it towards the highway. We crossed over the tracks, turned on Frontage Road and sped along the Bay for a couple miles, the tires hissing on the pavement. I was fading in and out the whole time. I felt like somebody had run me through a washer with a load of rocks and knives.

"Adam Brown." Crewcut turned around to look at him. "I've heard that name before."

"Yeah," Baldy said, blowing smoke in my face. "Kind of rings a bell."

We passed the motel by the Emery Cove Marina, then merged onto the highway, taking the 880 turn-off and following the overpass around the East Bay Municipal Sewage Plant. The Port of Oakland glared through the fog and a trickle of headlights flickered on the upper deck of the Bridge. Another mile and we took the West Grand exit, passing under the highway and bouncing over some tracks in the rain. Crossing lights flashed in the distance. No-Neck pulled up to a stop sign, waiting for a couple trucks to go by, then he turned on Maritime and headed towards the glow of the Outer Harbor.

We were in the bottoms. Back where it had all started. No-Neck turned off on a side street and followed it for a couple blocks while Crewcut talked to somebody on his walkie-talkie. The rain had turned into a steady drizzle and patches of fog drifted through the headlights. Warehouses, junk yards and container lots passed by the windows. We pulled up to a security gate and a thug in a rain coat came out of a shed and walked over with a flashlight. No-Neck cranked down his window and talked to him for a minute, then the guard unlocked the gate and pulled it open, splashing through a puddle.

Crewcut gabbed on his walkie-talkie, then turned to Baldy as we drove through the gate.

"OK," he said. "They're almost finished, so we should be able to wrap this up tonight. Leave the Lexus where it is and make a final sweep of the building. I'll give you a hand when I'm done."

"What about him?" Baldy nodded at Brown. "Nobody was looking for Clark Kent to show up."

Crewcut lit a cigarette, studying Brown. "Run his plates and verify his ID," he said. "We'll put everybody in the office until we can sort it all out."

We clattered down a road lined with stacks of shipping containers, then pulled into a lot in front of this huge warehouse with corrugated-iron walls and a loading dock that must've been half a block long. No-Neck parked next to a truck backed up to the dock, where a couple goons wearing rain-shell jackets stood guard by an open door. They were smoking and they both had shotguns slung over their shoulders. Lights blazed inside the warehouse, reflecting on the rain and a stream of water spilling from a busted gutter. No-Neck shut off the engine, then got out, opened Brown's door and pulled him out of the van. Baldy opened his door and dragged me out by the collar.

"Let's go," he said, shoving me towards a flight of stairs leading up to the dock.

#

Crewcut stopped to talk to one of the guards while Baldy and No-Neck herded us along the dock and through the door into the warehouse. The place was gigantic – the size of a football field, maybe – with a high, space-frame ceiling lined with open ducts and hazy track lights that stretched away in both directions. We were standing in an assembly area with a long row of garage doors that opened onto the dock, but the main floor of the warehouse was full of cargo – row after row of shelving and containers and wooden crates stacked ten-feet high from one end of the building to the other. A generator rumbled somewhere. Metal clanged and clattered. Baldy and No-Neck walked us past a row of offices and storage rooms, then we turned down a long aisle that ran between the stacks of cargo. I noticed that all the crates had LIGAR SHIPPING stenciled across the sides.

"Keep going." Baldy gave me a poke.

The stacks were like a maze: passages running off in every direction. We made a couple turns, then came out in this big, open space in front of an office with a closed door and a long window covered by venetian blinds. There were people everywhere: goons in suits, a couple guys wearing safety goggles and white lab coats, more thugs standing guard with sub-machine guns. A circle of tripod-mounted arc lights had been set up in the center of the space and the glare was dazzling after the darkness outside. The area was like a brightly-lit stage surrounded by walls of crates and dark corridors that all seemed to converge on that one spot. When my eyes adjusted to the glare, I saw the Lexus parked off to one side, hood and trunk open, its windshield glistening. The suitcase with the money and the briefcase full of documents were sitting on a table in front of the office, but I was so freaked I barely noticed them. I couldn't take my eyes off the thing mounted on a long concrete block under the circle of arc lights.

"Jesus Christ," Brown said in a strangled kind of voice.

It was a bomb. A monster bomb. Lying across a row of heavy iron mounts on top of the concrete pedestal, the thing looked like a propane tank with box fins on one end and it must've been twenty feet long and four or five feet in diameter. Flat black with faded serial numbers stenciled along its sides, it was surrounded by scaffolds and portable aluminum work platforms that gleamed under the lights and the whole assembly gave off this kind of deadly halo. The bomb casing had been removed in places and there were cables hooked up to the thing, all kinds of wires that ran down to the floor, leading off to computers and oscilloscopes set up on rolling carts arranged around the pedestal. A couple guys in lab coats were standing on the platforms, working on the bomb, making adjustments while their partners checked the computers down below. Looking up at the thing, I got this rush of cold terror like nothing I'd ever felt before.

"Move it." No-Neck gave Brown a shove and Baldy grabbed my elbow. They walked us past the bomb – it was so big we had to look up at it as we went by – staying outside the circle of arc lights and picking their way through the cables snaking across the floor. A forklift rolled out of a wide corridor on the other side of the space, its warning lights flashing. The driver looked like a Marine dressed in overalls with a cigar stuck in his mouth. He wore a headset mike and he was carrying a piece in an armpit shoulder holster. Everybody was armed. Even the lab-coat guys were packing.

Baldy pushed me along. He looked kind of tense.

"Hooking up with the press," he said as they walked us over to the office. "Bad move, squirt. That was a real bad move."

No-Neck unlocked the office door and they shoved us inside, locking the door behind us without a word. Brown looked like he was in shock and he couldn't see too hot without his glasses. He tripped over something and banged into a metal folding chair, but I grabbed his arm and kept him from falling down. Coughing and wheezing, he sat on the chair and slumped over, putting his face in his hands while I checked out our prison. The office had a faded carpet, water-stained walls, a desk with a filing cabinet and a conference table in the middle of the room. Arn sat at the other end of the table, surrounded by fast-food bags and bottles of water.

He gaped at me and I just stood there for a minute, staring at him like I'd never seen him before. He didn't register.

He didn't register at all.

Arn looked like a hostage in one of those terrorist videos they were always showing on the news. Scratching a ratty beard, his hair greasy and snarled, he didn't say jack for a while, didn't smile, didn't do anything. He just sat there staring at me with this dumb hostility that made me want to punch him in the mouth, then he looked away like he couldn't be bothered talking to the runty chick who'd ditched him in the bottoms.

I got the message, all right. He grabbed a plastic bottle off the table and slurped at it like he was dying of thirst, spilling water on his shirt, then he tossed the empty bottle on the floor and dragged a sleeve across his mouth, his eyes sliding from me to Brown, then back to me again. He had scrapes and bruises all over his face and he moved like an old man with arthritis when he got out of his chair, bracing his hands on the armrests and pushing himself to his feet.

"What's he doing here?" he asked, lifting his jaw at Brown. The reporter was sitting up in his chair now, staring into space.

I didn't say anything. Didn't know where to start.

Arn scowled at me for a minute, then he limped over to Brown.

"What're you doing here?" he asked, then he started coughing and walked back to his chair, flinching when he sat down again. "Somebody going to tell me what's going on? Who are these bastards? What's that thing they got out there?"

"Arn..." I couldn't take it anymore.

"Shut up, Emma." He shook his head, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. "Just shut up a minute."

I dropped into one of the chairs and nobody said anything for a while. We just sat there, staring at each other like idiots, listening to the rain and the voices in the warehouse and the forklift beeping as it moved around outside. Brown kept his mouth shut the whole time, squinting at us without his glasses, his eyes swollen and bloodshot. Finally, he lit a cigarette, got to his feet and gave one to Arn, who lit up with a sigh of relief. He was a heavy smoker and he must've been going crazy.

"I think we met at the Hot Box," Brown told him in this dull kind of voice. "My name's Adam Brown. Berkeley NewsWire."

"I know who you are." Arn studied me through a cloud of smoke. "What's the deal, Emma? I thought you were dead or busted or something."

I told him what had happened since the night with the Lexus, but I left out the parts where I shot the fed and tried to split with the money, and I didn't even try to explain the stuff Brown had told me. Arn didn't say a word when I got finished, just sat there looking at me like he'd never seen me before. It wasn't my fault I'd left him behind, but I got this rush of guilt all mixed up with flashbacks of Steffy and Vincent and this weird choking deal in my throat. But screw Arn. Screw him if he blamed it on me.

"It just happened too fast," he said after a while. "You got in the car and I saw them come out at the same time. I should've got the hell out of there, but I was like frozen or something. They pulled me out of the car and started wailing on me, man." He coughed, rubbing his chest, then he took a drag and slumped over in his chair, blowing smoke at the floor. "I gave them your name," he said, glancing at me with these haunted eyes. "They had a gun to my head and that bald guy was ready to use it. I told them everything we did that night. The cars. Everything. I told them where you lived."

We locked eyes for a minute, but I had to look away.

"What else could you do?" Brown asked morosely, hunched over his smoke. "They would've forced it out of you one way or another." He didn't mention the thing at Yah Joe – how I'd pulled a gun on him and wanted to take off after we found the money. He looked so dazed I wasn't even sure he remembered it.

"Who asked you?" Arn stomped out his cigarette, then turned back to me. "I thought they were pigs at first, then they tossed me in here. I didn't know if you got away or what and I've just been sitting around, listening to them doing whatever they're doing. Must be ten or fifteen guys off and on. Trucks coming and going. They brought me some junk food and stuff, but nobody told me crap."

An engine started in the warehouse. Footsteps passed the door and static hissed on a walkie-talkie. The sudden crackle made me jump.

Arn looked at me. Looked at Brown.

"Somebody say something," he yelled. "What the hell are they doing? What's that thing they've got out there?"

Brown stared at him, his eyes unfocused.

"It's a bomb," he said after a while. "A hydrogen bomb."

#

"This is crazy." Arn limped around the room, clutching at his ribs, flinching every time he set his weight down on the wrong foot. I just sat there, watching him. I was messed up in the head somehow. Shock, probably. I couldn't tell. "You're full of it, man!" Arn shouted. "What do you mean it's a bomb? It can't be a bomb!" He went on and on. "You telling me that's some kind of
nuke
? What the hell's it doing here? What're they going to do with it?"

"They're going to set it off," Brown said quietly. "Right here."

"
Here
?" That jolted me out of my stupor. "How can you tell?"

"You saw it." He settled back in his chair, blowing smoke at the ceiling, his forehead glistening with sweat. "It's permanently mounted. They're not getting it ready to ship somewhere. I don't know much about nuclear weapons, but it looked like they were wiring it up so they could detonate it in place."

"You're tripping," Arn yelled. "There's no way."

"Why would they set it off in the city?" I asked.

Brown shrugged. "Who knows? There could be a lot of reasons." He pulled at his cigarette, his hand shaking a little. "Whatever's going on, this isn't some rogue operation that Oliver's running on his own. It's too open. He has to keep the police away from the warehouse. Homeland Security. Customs. The FBI. There's no way he could've set this up without official cover."

"What're you babbling about?" Arn asked. "Who's Oliver?"

"The guy with the crewcut," I told him. "He's supposed to be this spook works for the CIA."

"The CIA?" Arn blinked at me. "You're crazy."