“Some shit from the factory!”
The words dissolved into coughs.
“That man... He can’t leave here. Stop him. Now!” This was from Ahmad.
Rass couldn’t fire, though, not with the lack of visibility.
Shaw crouched, staying under cover of the cloud. He moved in a wide circle.
“I can’t see him!”
“There! He’s there! Going for the window.”
“We’re four stories up. Let him jump.” Ahmad again.
“No, he’s going the other way.” Panicky LeClaire’s voice was high.
“It’s going to kill us! Out. Now!”
Their voices fell into choked shouts and obscenities and then went silent as they pushed toward the door.
Shaw felt his way back through the shelves and to the window by which he’d entered the factory. Choking, he descended the fire escape to a decrepit dock that jutted into the river. He jogged over the uneven wood, dark with creosote and slick with ancient oil, and climbed down into an alley that ran beside the factory from the river to Manufacturers Row.
He walked to the dumpster that sat halfway down the alley and worked on clearing his lungs, hawking, spitting, inhaling deeply. The coughing stopped, but what he was breathing here wasn’t much better than the fumes. The air was laced with the acrid off-gases from the wide Kenoah River, its hue jaundice brown. He’d come to know the scent quite well; the distinctive sour perfume hung over much of central Ferrington.
At the dumpster, whose top was open, he scanned around and saw no one nearby. First he lifted out the gray Blackhawk inside-the-belt holster containing his Glock, the model 42, and clipped it in place. Then a thirty-two-ounce bottle of water. He filled his mouth and spit several times. Then he drank down half of what remained and collected his personal effects.
Hand on the grip of his weapon, he looked about once more.
No sign of Rass and his small silver gun, or the other men. Were they searching for him?
Walking to the front of the alley, Shaw noted that the answer was no. The three hurried away from the factory, Ahmad clutching the briefcase. The Saudis climbed into their Mercedes, and LeClaire his Toyota. The vehicles sped off in different directions.
Shaw returned to the dumpster.
Reaching inside, he extracted a backpack and into it he slipped the gray metal box that had been in the attaché case upstairs. He slung the bag over his shoulder and exited the alley onto gloomyManufacturers Row. He turned right, pulling a phone from the pack and sending several texts.
He then continued his walk toward downtown Ferrington.
Thinking of the trap.
Indeed it was simple and efficient. But it was also one ofShaw’smaking, not one set by the three men in the room.
Hired by a corporate CEO recently to stop the theft of a revolutionary industrial component, which had been designed by the company’s most brilliant engineer, Shaw had narrowed the list of suspects to LeClaire. The scrawny, nervous IT man—a compulsive and bad gambler—had arranged to sell the device to the Saudi buyers. Shaw had learned that the transfer was going down in the factory this morning.
While the CEO just wanted the device—known by the acronym S.I.T.—recovered and the identity of the thief revealed, Shaw thought it was a better idea to swap the real one for a fake that contained a GPS tracker, which would reveal its ultimate destination and, ideally, the identity of the buyer.
Shaw’s private eye, based in the nation’s capital, had found a PI in Ferrington, Lenny Caster. He’d assembled tools, surveillance gear and some other supplies. Then, last night, the two men had rigged the trip wire in the Welbourne & Sons building. Shaw had placed a military-style smoke bomb in one of the oil drums that would fall when the “trap” sprung.
In a van not far away, Caster had been monitoring the entire incident via a bug planted in the workshop. When he heard their code—“Wait. There’s something I”—he triggered the bomb, releasing the dense smoke, whose recipe Shaw and his siblings had been taught by their father, obscuring clouds like this one being just another aspect of the art and science of survivalism. Shaw had made the batch himself with potassium chlorate oxidizer, lactose as a fuel and solvent yellow 33, along with a dash of sodium bicarbonate to decrease the temperature of the burn. Trespassing was one thing; arson another.
Once the smoke had filled the room, Shaw had pulled the mock-up of the device from the worktable drawer where he’d hidden it last night and did the swap. He’d then made his way to the window and dropped the real S.I.T. into the dumpster, forty feet below.
Now he was walking through the shadowy, soot-stained brick valley of abandoned factories and warehouses.
Briscow Tool and Die
Martin and Sons Iron Works, Ltd.