Iron Sunrise

OUT OF THE FRYING PAN

“May I ask what I’m accused of?” Rachel asked for the third time. Don’t let them get to you, she told herself, forcing her face into a bland smile: One slip and they’ll hang you out to dry.

The daylight filtering through the window-wall was tinted pale blue by the slab of dumb aerogel, the sky above the distant mountains dimmed to a remote purple. Behind the heads of her inquisitors she focused on the contrail of a commuter plane scratching its way across the glass-smooth stratosphere.

“There are no charges,” the leader of the kangaroo court said, smiling right back at her. “You haven’t broken any regulations, have you?” The man next to her cleared his throat. “Well, none of ours,” she added, her exaggeratedly dyed lips curling minutely in distaste. Rachel focused on her hairline. Madam Chairman was dressed in an exaggeratedly femme historical style — perhaps to add a touch of velvet and lace to her S M management style — but a ringlet of hair had broken free of whatever chemical cosh she used to discipline it, and threatened to flop over one razor-finished eyebrow in a quizzical curl.

’The excursion to Rochard’s World was not my initiative, as I pointed out in my report,” Rachel calmly repeated, despite the urge to reach across the table and tweak Madam Chairman’s hairdo. Damn, I’d like to see you manage a field operation gone bad, she thought. “George Cho got the run-around from the New Republican government, the idiots had already decided to violate the Third Commandment before I arrived on the scene, and if I hadn’t been in position, there wouldn’t have been anybody on the ground when the shit hit the fan. So George sent me. As I think I’ve already stated, you’re not cleared to read the full report. But that’s not what this is about, is it?”

She leaned back and took a sip from her water glass, staring at the chief mugger through half-closed eyes. Madam Chairman the honorable Seat Warmer, who evidently rejoiced under the name of Gilda something-or-other, took advantage of the pause to lean sideways and whisper something in Minion Number One’s ear. Rachel put her glass down and smiled tightly at Madam Chairman. She had the soul of an auditor and a coterie of gray yes-people; she’d come for Rachel out of nowhere the day before, armed with a remit to audit her and a list of questions as long as her arm, mostly centering on Rachel’s last posting outside the terrestrial light cone. It had been clear from the start that she didn’t know what the hell Rachel did for the diplomatic service, and didn’t care. What she was pissed off about was the fact that Rachel was listed on the budget as an entertainments officer or cultural attaché — a glorified bribe factor for the department of trade — and that this was her turf. The fact that Rachel’s listing was actually a cover for a very different job clearly didn’t mean anything to her.

Rachel fixed Madam Chairman with her best poker face. “What you’re digging for is who it was that authorized George to send me to Rochard’s World, and who ordered the budget spend. The long and the short of that is, it’s outside your remit. If you think you’ve got need to know, take it up with Security.”

She smiled thinly. She’d been assigned to Cho’s legation to the New Republic on the Ents payroll, but was really there for a black-bag job; she answered to the Black Chamber, and Madam Chairman would run into a brick wall as soon as she tried to pursue the matter there. But the Black Chamber had to maintain Rachel’s official cover — the UN had an open hearings policy on audits to reassure its shareholders that their subscriptions were being spent equitably — and she was consequently stuck with going through the motions. Up to and including being fired for misappropriation of funds if some bureaucratic greasy-pole climber decided she was a good back to stab on the way up. It was just one of the risks that went with the job of being a covert arms control inspector.

Gilda’s own smile slid imperceptibly into a frown. Her politician-model cosmetic implant didn’t know how to interpret such an unprogrammed mood: for a moment, bluish scales hazed into view on her cheeks, and her pupils formed vertical slits. Then the lizard look faded. “I disagree,” she said airily, waving away the objection. “It was your job, as officer on-site, to account for expenditure on line items. The UN is not made of money, we all have a fiduciary duty to our shareholders to ensure that peacekeeping operations run at a profit, and there is a small matter of eighty kilograms of highly enriched — weapons grade — uranium that remains unaccounted for. Uranium, my dear, does not grow on trees. Next, there’s your unauthorized assignment of a diplomatic emergency bag, class one, registered to this harebrained scheme of Ambassador Cho’s, to support your junket aboard the target’s warship. The bag was subsequently expended in making an escape when everything went wrong — as you predicted at the start of the affair, so you should have known better than to go along in the first place. And then there’s the matter of you taking aboard hitchhikers—”

“Under the terms of the common law of space, I had an obligation to rescue any stranded persons I could take on board.” Rachel glared at Minion Number One, who glared right back, then hastily looked away. Damn, that was a mistake, she realized. A palpable hit. “I’ll also remind you that I have a right under section two of the operational guidelines for field officers to make use of official facilities for rescuing dependents in time of conflict.”

“You weren’t married to him at the time,” Madam Chairman cut in icily.

“Are you sure it wasn’t a marriage of convenience?” Minion Number Two chirped out, hunting for an opportunistic shot.

“I would say the facts do tend to support that assumption,” Minion Number One agreed.

“The facts of the matter are that you appear to have spent a great deal of UN money without achieving anything of any significance,” Madam Chairman trilled in a singsong. She was on a roll: she leaned forward, bosom heaving with emotion and cheeks flushed with triumph as she prepared for the kill. “We hold you to account for this operation, Junior Attaché Mansour. Not to put too fine a point on it, you wasted more than two million ecus of official funds on a wildcat mission that didn’t deliver any measurable benefits you can point to. You’re on the personnel roster under my oversight, and your screwup makes Entertainments and Culture look bad. Or hadn’t you realized the adverse impact your spy fantasies might have on the serious job of marketing our constituent’s products abroad? I can find some minor contributions to the bottom line on your part m the distant past, but you’re very short on mitigating factors; for that reason, we’re going to give you twenty-seven—”

“Twenty-six!” interrupted Minion Number Two.

“—Twenty-six days to submit to a full extra-departmental audit with a remit to prepare a report on the disposition of funds during operation Mike November Charlie Four Seven-slash-Delta, and to evaluate the best practices compliance of your quality outcome assurance in the context of preventing that brushfire conflict from turning into a full-scale interstellar war.” Madam Chairman simpered at her own brilliance, fanning herself with a hard copy of Rachel’s public-consumption report.

“A full-scale audit?” Rachel burst out: “You stupid, stupid, desk pilot!” She glanced round, fingering the control rings for her personal assist twitchily. A security guard would have gone for the floor at that point, but Rachel managed to restrain herself even though the adrenaline was flowing, and the upgrades installed in her parasympathetic peripheral nervous system were boosting her toward combat readiness. “Try to audit me. Just try it!” She crossed her arms tensely. “You’ll hit a brick wall. Who’s in your management matrix grid? Do you think we can’t reach all of them? Do you really want to annoy the Black Chamber?”

Madam Chairman rose and faced Rachel stiffly, like a cobra ready to spit. “You, you slimy little minx, you cowboy—” she hissed, waving a finger under Rachel’s nose — “I’ll see you on the street before you’re ever listed under Entertainments and Culture again! I know your game, you scheming little pole-climber, and I’ll—”

Rachel was about to reply when her left earlobe buzzed. “Excuse me a moment,” she said, raising a hand, “incoming.” She cupped a hand to her ear. “Yeah, who is this?”

“Stop that at once! This is my audit committee, not a talking shop—”

“Polis dispatch. Are you Rachel Mansour? SXB active three-zero-two? Can you confirm your identity?”

Rachel stood up, her pulse pounding, feeling weak with shock. “Yes, that’s me,” she said distantly. “Here’s my fingerprint.” She touched a finger to her forehead, coupling a transdermal ID implant to the phone so that it could vouch for her.

“Someone stop her! Philippe, can’t you jam her? This is a disgrace!”

“Voiceprint confirmed. I have you authenticated. This is the Fourth Republican Police Corporation, dispatch control for Geneva. You’re in the Place du Molard, aren’t you? We have an urgent SXB report that’s just across the way from you. We’ve called in the regional squad, but it’s our bad luck that something big’s going down just outside Brasilia, and the whole team is out there providing backup. They can’t get back in less than two hours, and the headcase is threatening us with an excursion in only fifty-four minutes.”

“Oh. Oh, hell!” Situations like this tended to dredge up reflexive blasphemies left over from her upbringing. Rachel turned toward the door, blanking on her surroundings. Sometimes she had nightmares about this sort of thing, nightmares that dragged her awake screaming in the middle of the night, worrying Martin badly. “Can you have someone pick me up in the concourse? Brief me on the way in. You know I haven’t handled one of these in years? I’m on the reserve list.”

“Stop that now!” Madam Chairman was in the way, standing between Rachel and the doorway. She pouted like a fighting fish faced with a mirror, bloodred lips tight with anger and fists balled. “You can’t just walk out of here!”

“What are you going to do, slap me?” Rachel asked, sounding amused.

“I’ll bring charges! You arranged this distraction—”

Rachel reached out, picked Madam Chairman up by her elbows, and deposited her on the conference table in a howl of outrage and a flurry of silk skirts. “Stick to minding your desk,” Rachel said coldly, unable to resist the urge to rub it in. “The adults have got important work to be getting on with.”

Rachel just about had the shakes under control by the time she reached the main exit. Stupid, stupid! she chided herself. Blowing up at Madam Chairman could only make things worse, and with the job ahead she needed desperately to cultivate a calm head. A police transporter was waiting for her in the landscaped courtyard outside the UN office dome, squatting in the shadow of a giant statue of Otto von Bismarck. “Suspect an unemployed artist and recluse believed to be named Idi Amin Dadaist,” the police dispatcher told her via her bonephone, simultaneously throwing a bunch of images at the inside of her left eyelid. “No previous record other than minor torts for public arts happenings with no purchase of public disturbance and meme pollution rights, and an outstanding lawsuit from the People’s Republic of Midlothian over his claim to the title of Last King of Scotland. He’s—”

The next words were drowned out by the warble of alarm sirens. Someone in the headquarters bubble had been told what was going down a few blocks away. “I haven’t even done a training update for one of these in three years!” Rachel shouted into the palm of her hand as she jogged toward the transporter. She climbed in, and it surged away, meters ahead of the human tide streaming out of the building toward the nearest bomb shelters. “Don’t you have anyone who’s current?”

“You used to be full-time with SXB, that’s why we’ve still got you flagged as a standby,” said the dispatcher. A worried-looking cop glanced round from the pilot’s seat, leaving the driving to the autopilot. “The regulars, like I said, they’re all en route from Brasilia by suborbital. We’re a peaceful city. This is the first bomb scare we’ve had in nearly twenty years. You’re the only specialist — active or reserve — in town today.”

“Jesus! So it had to happen when everyone was away. What can you tell me about the scene?”

“The perp’s holed up in a refugee stack in Saint-Leger. Says he’s got an improv gadget, and he’s going to detonate it in an hour minus eight minutes unless we accede to his demands. We’re not sure what kind it is, or what his demands are, but it doesn’t really matter — even a pipe bomb loaded with cobalt sixty would make a huge mess of the neighborhood.”

“Right.” Rachel shook her head. “’Scuse me, I’ve just come from a meeting with a bunch of time-wasters, and I’m trying to get my head together. You’re saying it’s going to be a hands-on job?”

“He’s holed up in a cheap apartment tree. He’s indoors, well away from windows, vents, doors. Our floor penetrator says he’s in the entertainment room with something dense enough to be a gadget. The stack is dusted, but we’re having fun replaying the ubiquitous surveillance takes for the past month — seems he started jamming before anything else, and his RFID tag trace is much too clean. Someone has to go inside and talk him down or take him out, and you’ve got more experience of this than any of us. It says here you’ve done more than twenty of these jobs; that makes you our nearest expert.”

“Hell and deviltry. Who’s the underwriter for this block?”

“It’s all outsourced by the city government — I think Lloyds has something to do with it. Whatever, you bill us for any expenses, and we’ll sort them out. Anything you need for the job is yours, period.”

“Okay.” She sighed, half-appalled at how easy it was to slip back into old ways of thinking and feeling. Last time, she’d sworn it would be her last job. Last time she’d actually tried to slit her wrists afterward, before she saw sense and realized that there were easier ways out of the profession. Like switching to something even more dangerous, as it turned out. “One condition: my husband. Get someone to call him, right now. If he’s in town tell him to get under cover. And get as many people as possible into bunkers. The older apartments are riddled with the things, aren’t they? There is no guarantee that I’m going to be able to pull this off on my own without a support and planning backstop team, and I don’t want you to count on miracles. Have you got a disaster kit standing by?”

“We’re already evacuating, and there’ll be a disaster kit waiting on-site when you arrive,” said the dispatcher. “Our normal SXB team are on the way home, but they won’t be able to take over for an hour and a half, and they’ll be into reentry blackout in about ten minutes — I think that means they won’t be much help to you.”

“Right.” Rachel nodded, redundantly. She’d dressed for the office, but unlike Madam Chairman, she didn’t go in for retro-femme frills and frou-frou: she’d had enough of that in the year she’d spent in the New Republic. What does the bitch have against me, anyway? she asked herself, making a mental note to do some data mining later. She dialed her jacket and leggings to sky blue — calming colors — and settled back in the seat, breathing deeply and steadily. “No point asking for armor, I guess. Do you have any snipers on hand?”

“Three teams are on their way. They’ll be set up with crossfire and hard-surface-penetrating sights in about twenty minutes. Inspector MacDougal is supervising.”

“Has he evacuated the apartments yet?”

“It’s in progress. She’s moving in noisemakers as her people pull the civilians. Orders are to avoid anything that might tip him off that we’ve got an operation in train.”

’Good. Hmm. You said the perp’s an artist.” Rachel paused. “Does anyone know what kind of artist?”

The transporter leaned into the corner with the Boulevard Jacques, then surged down the monorail track. Other pods, their guidance systems overridden, slewed out of its way: two police trucks, bouncing on their pneumatic tires, were coming up fast behind. The buildings thereabouts were old, stone and brick and wood that had gone up back before the Diaspora and gone out of fashion sometime since, lending the old quarter something of the air of a twenty-first-century theme park far gone in ungenteel decay. “He’s an historical re-enactor,” said the dispatcher. “There’s something here about colonies. Colonialism. Apparently it’s all to do with reenacting the historic process of black liberation before the holocaust.”

“Which holocaust?”

“The African one. Says here he impersonates a pre-holocaust emperor called Idi Amin, uh, Idi Amin Dada. There’s a release about reinterpreting the absurdist elements of the Ugandan proletarian reformation dialectic through the refracting lens of neo-Dadaist ideological situationism.”

“Whatever that means. Okay. Next question, where was this guy born? Where did he come from? What does he do?”

“He was born somewhere in Paraguay. He’s had extensive phenotype surgery to make himself resemble his role model, the Last King of Scotland or President of Uganda or whoever he was. Got a brochure from one of his performances here — says he tries to act as an emulation platform for the original Idi Amin’s soul.”

“And now he’s gone crazy, right? Can you dig anything up about the history of the original Mister Amin? Sounds Islamicist to me. Was he an Arab or something?”

The transporter braked, swerved wildly, then hopped off the monorail and nosed in between a whole mass of cops milling around in front of a large, decrepit-looking spiral of modular refugee condominiums hanging off an extruded titanium tree. A steady stream of people flowed out of the block, escorted by rentacops in the direction of the Place de Philosophes. Rachel could already see a queue of lifters coming in, trying to evacuate as many people as possible from the blocks around ground zero. It didn’t matter whether or not this particular fuckwit was competent enough to build a working nuke: if the Plutonium Fairy had been generous, he could make his gadget fizzle and contaminate several blocks. Even a lump of plastique coated with stolen high-level waste could be messy. Actinide metal chelation and gene repair therapy for several thousand people was one hell of an expensive way to pay for an artistic tantrum, and if he did manage to achieve prompt criticality …

The officer in charge — a tall blond woman with a trail of cops surrounding her — was coming over. “You! Are you the specialist dispatch has been praying for?” she demanded.

“Yeah, that’s me.” Rachel shrugged uncomfortably. “Bad news is, I’ve had no time to prep for this job, and I haven’t done one in three or four years. What have you got for me?”

“A real bampot, it would seem. I’m Inspector Rosa MacDougal, Laughing Joker Enforcement Associates. Please follow me.”

The rentacop site office was the center of a hive of activity, expanding to cover half the grassed-over car park in front of the apartment block. The office itself was painted vomit-green and showed little sign of regular maintenance, or even cleaning. “I haven’t worked with Laughing Joker before,” Rachel admitted. “First, let me tell you that as with all SXB ops, this is pro bono, but we expect unrestricted donations of equipment and support during the event, and death benefits for next of kin if things go pear-shaped. We do not accept liability for failure, on account of the SXB point team usually being too dead to argue the point. We just do our best. Is that clear with you?”

“Crystal.” MacDougal pointed at a chair. “Sit yourself down. We’ve got half an hour before it goes critical.”

“Right.” Rachel sat. She made a steeple of her fingers, then sighed. “How sure are you that this is genuine?”

“The first thing anyone knew about it was when the building’s passive neutron sniffer jumped off the wall. At first the block manager thought it was malf-ing, but it turns out yon Idiot was tickling the dragon’s tail. He’d got a cheap-ass assembler blueprint from some anarchist phile vault, and he’s been buying beryllium feedstock for his kitchen assembler over the past six months.”

“Shit. Beryllium. And nobody noticed?”

“Hey.” MacDougal spread her hands. “Nobody here is paying us for sparrow-fart coverage. Private enterprise doesn’t stretch to ubiquitous hand-holding. We go poking our noses in uninvited, we get sued till we bleed. It’s a free market, isn’t it?”

“Huh.” Rachel nodded. It was an old, familiar picture. With nine hundred permanent seats on the UN Security SIG, the only miracle was that anything ever got done at all. Still, if anything could stimulate cooperation, it was the lethal combination of household nanofactories and cheap black-market weapons-grade fissiles. The right to self-defense did not, it was generally held, extend as far as mutually assured destruction — at least, not in built-up areas. Hence the SXB volunteers, and her recurring nightmares and subsequent move to the diplomatic corps’ covert arms control team. Which was basically the same job on an interstellar scale, with the benefit that governments usually tended to be more rational about the disposition of their strategic interstellar deterrents than bampot street performers with a grudge against society and a home brew nuke.

Okay. So our target somehow scored twelve kilos of weapons-grade heavy metal and tested a subcritical assembly before anybody noticed. What then?”

“The block management ’bot issued an automatic fourteen-day eviction notice for violation of the tenancy agreement. There’s a strict zero-tolerance policy for weapons of mass destruction in this town.”

“Oh, sweet Jesus.” Rachel rubbed her forehead.

“It gets better,” Inspector MacDougal added with morbid enthusiasm. “Our bampot messaged the management ’bot right back, demanding that they recognize him as President of Uganda, King of Scotland, Supreme Planetary Dictator, and Left Hand of the Eschaton. The ’bot told him to fuck right off, which probably wasnae good idea: that’s when he threatened to nuke ’em.”

“So, basically it’s your routine tenant/landlord fracas, with added fallout plume.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Shit. So what happened next?”

“Well, the management ’bot flagged the threat as being (a) a threat to damage the residential property, and (b) subtype, bomb hoax. So it called up its insurance link, and our ’bot sent Officer Schwartz round to have a polite word. And that’s when it turned intae the full-dress faeco-ventilatory intersection scene.”

“Is Officer Schwartz available?” asked Rachel.

“Right here,” grunted what Rachel had mistaken for a spare suit of full military plate. It wasn’t: it was SWAT-team armor, and it was also occupied. Schwartz turned ponderously toward her. “I was just up-suiting for to go in.”

“Oh.” Rachel blinked. “Just what’s the situation up there, then?”

“A very large man, he is,” said Schwartz. “High-melatonin tweak. Also, high-androgenic steroid tweak. Built like the west end of an eastbound panzer. Lives like a pig! Ach.” He grunted. “He is an artiste. This does not, I say, entitle one to live like animal.”

“Tell her what happened,” MacDougal said tiredly, breaking off from fielding a call on her wristplant.

“Oh. This artist demands to be crowned King of Africa or some such. I tell him politely no, he may however he crowned king of the stretch of gutter between numbers 19 and 21 on the Rue Tabazan if he wishes to not leave quietly. I was not armored up at that time, so when monsieur l’artiste points a gun at me, I leave quietly instead and thank my fate for I am allowed to do so.”

“What kind of gun?”

“Database says it is a historical replica Kalashnikov mechanism.”

“Did you see any sign of his bomb?” asked Rachel, with a sinking sensation.

“Only the dead man’s trigger strapped to his left wrist,” said Officer Schwartz, a glint in his eyes just visible through the thick visor of his helmet. “But my helmet detected slow neutron flux. He says it is a uranium-gun design, by your leave.”

“Oh shit!” Rachel leaned forward, thinking furiously: Nuclear blackmail. Fail-hard switch. Simple but deadly uranium-gun design. Loon lies bleeding, in the distance the double flash of the X-ray pulse burning the opaque air, plasma shutter flickering to release the heat pulse. Idi Amin Dadaist impersonating a dead dictator to perfection. Fifty-one minutes to detonation, if he has the guts to follow through. The performance artist scorned. What would an artist do?

“Give him half a chance and an audience, he’ll push the button,” she said faintly.

“I’m sorry?”

She looked out of the window at the steady stream of poor evacuees being shepherded away from the site. They were clearly poor; most of them had lopsided or misshapen or otherwise ugly, natural faces — one or two actually looked aged. “He’s an artist,” she said calmly. “I’ve dealt with the type before, and recently. Like the bad guy said, never give an artist a Browning; they’re some of the most dangerous folks you can meet. The Festival fringe — shit! Artists almost always want an audience, the spectacle of destruction. That name — Dadaist. It’s a dead giveaway. Expect a senseless act of mass violence, the theater of cruelty. About all I can do is try and keep him talking while you get in position to kill him. And don’t give him anything he might mistake for an audience. What kind of profile match do you have?”

“He’s a good old-fashioned radge. That is to say, a dangerous fuckwit,” said MacDougal, frowning. She blinked for a moment as if she had something in her eye, then flicked another glyph at Rachel. “Here. Read it fast, then start talking. I don’t think we’ve got much time for sitting around.”

“Okay.” Rachel’s nostrils flared, taking in a malodorous mixture of stale coffee, nervous sweat, the odor of a police mobile incident room sitting on the edge of ground zero. She focused on the notes — not that there was much to read, beyond the usual tired litany of red-lined credit ratings, public trust derivatives, broken promises, exhibitions of petrified feco-stalagmites, and an advanced career as an art-school dropout. Idi had tried to get into the army, any army — but not even a second-rate private mercenary garrison force from Wichita would take him. Nutty as a squirrel cage, said a telling wikinote from the recruiting sergeant’s personal assist. MacDougal’s diagnosis was already looking worryingly plausible when Rachel stumbled into the docs covering his lifelong obsession and saw the ancient photographs, and the bills from the cheapjack body shop Idi — his real name of record, now he’d put his dismal family history behind him — spent all his meager insurance handouts on. “Treponema pallidum injections — holy shit, he paid to be infected with syphilis?”

“Yeah, and not just any kind — he wanted the fun tertiary version where your bones begin to melt, your face falls off, and you suffer from dementia and wild rages. None of the intervening decades of oozing pus from the genitals for our man Idi.”

“He’s mad.” Rachel shook her head.

“I’ve been telling you that, yes. What I want to know is, can you take him?”

“Hmm.” She took stock. “He’s big. Is he as hard as he looks?”

“No.” This from Schwartz. “I could myself have easily taken him, without armor. Only he had a gun. He is ill, an autosickie.”

“Well then.” Rachel reached a decision. “We’ve got, what? Forty-four minutes? When you’ve got everybody out, I think I’m going to have to go in and talk to him face-to-face. Keep the guns out of sight but if you can get a shot straight down through the ceiling that—”

“No bullets,” said MacDougal. “We don’t know how he’s wired the dead man’s handle, and we can’t afford to take chances. We’ve got these, though.” She held up a small case: “Robowasps loaded with sleepy-juice, remotely guided. One sting, and he’ll be turned off in ten seconds. The hairy time is between him realizing he’s going down and the lights going out. Someone’s got to stop him yelling a detonation command, tripping the dead man’s handle, or otherwise making the weasel go pop.”

“Okay.” Rachel nodded thoughtfully, trying to ignore the churning in her gut and the instinctive urge to jump up and run — anywhere, as long as it was away from the diseased loony with the Osama complex and the atom bomb upstairs. “So you hook into me for a full sensory feed, I go in, I talk, I play it by ear. We’ll need two code words. ‘I’m going to sneeze’ means I’m going to try to punch him out myself. And, uh, ‘That’s a funny smell’ means I want you to come in with everything you’ve got. If you can plant a lobotomy shot on him, do it, even if you have to shoot through me. Just try to miss my brain stem if it comes down to it. That’s how we play this game. Wasps would be better, though. I’ll try not to call you unless I’m sure I can immobilize him, or I’m sure he’s about to push the button.” She shivered, feeling a familiar rush of nervous energy.

“Are you about that certain?” Schwartz asked, sounding dubious.

Rachel stared at him. “This fuckwit is going to maybe kill dozens, maybe hundreds of people if we don’t nail him right now,” she said. “What do you think?”

Schwartz swallowed. MacDougal shook her head. “What is it you do for a living, again?” she asked.

“I reach the parts ordinary disarmament inspectors don’t touch.” Rachel grinned, baring her teeth at her own fear. She stood up. “Let’s go sort him out.”