The Whole Truth (A. Shaw 1)

Shaw tapped the contents of the suitcase. “This is a gamma bomb, not a set of knives, not a diamond for the missus. I’m not running a special, no two-for-ones tonight.”

“And the reason we cannot simply take it from you now? For nothing?”

The Tunisian must’ve been a mind reader because he already had his knife back out and his eyes were burning, no doubt with the thought of sticking the blade to the hilt in Shaw’s thick neck.

“And kill you,” the Iranian finished, quite unnecessarily, for Shaw had already gotten the point.

Shaw motioned to a slit on the side of the dirty bomb that resembled a DVD intake slot. “That’s the import drive for the accompanying software package that has the automatic detonation codes and generally makes this thing go boom and the radiation go sizzle. You try to do it without the software the only thing that gets fried is your ass.”

“And where is this package?”

“Nowhere near here, that’s for damn sure.”

The Iranian slapped the suitcase. “So this is useless to me!”

“As the term sheet clearly said,” Shaw began in a weary voice, “you get the hardware with fifty percent down and the software when the other half is received in the designated account.”

“And I must simply trust you?” the Iranian said, a nasty undertone to his words.

“Just like we have to trust you. We’ve been doing this a long time, and never had a disappointed customer yet. You know that or you wouldn’t be here.”

The Iranian hesitated.

Come on, you maggot. Sacrifice a little lost face in front of your boys to get the golden egg. You know you want it. Think about how many Americans you can zap with this shit.

“I will have to call someone first.”

Shaw said in an annoyed tone, “I thought you had the authority to act.”

The Iranian shot nervous glances at his men, the embarrassment clear on his finely cut features. “One call,” he said quickly. He pulled out his phone.

Shaw held up a hand. “Hold it! Interpol crashing our little party does not figure into my vacation plans.”

“I won’t be on it long enough for anyone to trace.”

“You’ve been watching too many Dirty Harry movies. That’s not healthy in our line of business.”

“What are you talking about?” snapped the Iranian.

“I know you guys are really into the ninth century and all, but you need to get with the twenty-first century if you want to stay off death row. They don’t need you yakking on a rotary dial phone for two days to trace you. They need exactly three seconds for a satellite to track the digital fingerprint, run a triangulation, isolate the cell towers, burn a signal mark to within ten feet, and deploy the strike team.” Shaw was speaking mostly crap but it sounded good. “Why do you think bin Laden lives in a cave and writes his orders down on frigging toilet paper?”

The Iranian glanced at his phone as though it had just stung him. Shaw reached slowly in his pocket, mindful of the bloodthirsty Tunisian, and withdrew his own cell phone, which he tossed to the terrorist leader.

“State-of-the-art scrambler and signal diffuser. That sucker even has photon light burst encoding capability, so not even a quantum computer, in the event anyone has actually invented one, can crack the bytes packet. So dial away, my friend. The minutes are on me.”

The man made the call, facing the wall so Shaw could not hear him or read his lips.

Shaw turned his attention to the Tunisian. In a language he was reasonably sure neither the man nor any of the others spoke he said, “You like to hump little boys, don’t you?”

The baffled Tunisian simply stared at him, unable to comprehend a Chinese dialect from a tiny province in the south of the communist country. Shaw had spent a year of his life there, almost died twice, and only managed to get out with the help of a peasant farmer and his ancient, belching Ford. With all that, he figured learning the language might come in handy, though he never saw himself going back there, at least voluntarily.

The Iranian handed the phone back to Shaw, who flipped it into his pocket.

“It is agreed,” he said.

“Glad to hear it,” Shaw replied as his fist crushed the nose of the Tunisian. In the same motion he swung the heavy suitcase around, catching two other men flush on the temples. They toppled to the floor either dead or damn near it.

An instant later the door burst open and a half dozen figures clad in body armor and hefting submachine guns crowded in, screaming at people to put their hands up and their weapons down and not necessarily in that order if they didn’t want a new eye in the middle of their foreheads.